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Auto-Login for Plesk/Parallels

Parallels login annoys me, all logins do. Of course, it's that old security<-->convenience sliding scale again. Normally it's not a big issue, but if I have a lot to do in my hosting panel, it starts to get painful quickly. Parallel's sessions are also set on a hair trigger so if you leave the page for more than 1.25 seconds, you get logged out again. Or thereabouts.

Unlike Chrome, Firefox requires that I type three letters (username - I could also do one letter, a down key, etc, but it's quicker to type), then hit the tab key and then, at the end of this song and dance, hit the enter key to FINALLY login (my password is thankfully remembered, once I removed the autocomplete blocking that, that is), but this is obviously way too much work to get into my control panel, especially when it's dozens dozens of times a day.

In no time, I Google myself right back to a tool I already had installed: Greasemonkey. Oh yeah! It's been running away inside Firefox for ages, but I never did find the time to play with it, until now.

It turns out this is so trivially easy to do with Greasemonkey that probably most gm experts wouldn't even bother to mention it. I'm mentioning it, in case you need it. The "User Script" goes like this..

Insert your own URL and username/password combo and you are good to go.

Obviously this code can be customized to whatever login you need by simply switching in the correct id values for your form, perhaps tweaking the submit() action. An eBay UK login might look like this..

And so on. Note we specify https, so the scripts won't kick in if we mistakenly get to an insecure version of the page, sending our passwords over the wire in plain text.

At the end of the day, it works superbly. I only see the login pages for a moment now, and then I'm in.

Bye bye logins!

;o) Cor

ps. It should probably be noted that you now have plain text passwords kicking around your app data folder. If the user security on your machine isn't excellent, you would probably be wise not to create auto-login scripts for banks, building societies, and other institutions with access to your financial data.